DS: Inheritance
by Thor2000
Summary: In an alternate quantum reality to the known series, Victoria Winters inherits Collinwood and learns the dark secret that removed her family from this timeline.


Four boys rode their bikes through the narrow wooded trails on the Collins Estate. The sky was turning dark blue and the woods as black as a grave closing in on them as they sailed up hills and ducked branches to Collinwood, the huge empty house on the property. Rumor had it that in 1967, almost ten years ago, something had been unleashed at Collinwood that had killed every single member of the family. Since that night, not one member of the family had ever been seen, but then that was the rumor. Police had searched the house and grounds and had not found a thing. The family business was in the hands of the board of directors as detectives scoured the family records to find the next living relative. In the meantime, the structure was a local reputed haunted house where no one lived and no one came except for curious teens looking for ghosts.   
  
One bike skidded to a stop as the leader of the group waited for his other cronies to catch up to him. Tall and wiry, Steve Barnette scratched his head of blonde hair and looked at the windows of the house. They were all black and forebodingly empty as they stared back to him vacantly as the sockets on a huge skull. In fact, the deserted structure seemed to be looking back at him as he got a shiver.   
  
"Okay," Steve started speaking to his nighttime posse. "Welcome to Collinwood, the largest haunted house in Maine. Eight years ago, Elizabeth Stoddard and her daughter Carolyn lived here all alone but for one servant who died mysteriously. They were joined by her brother Roger and his son David and then sometime later a cousin from England named Barnabas that they didn't know they had."   
  
Some of the boys smirked at the ghost story as the fourth boy stood nervously. Holding a flashlight, Jason Pryde flicked on his light and scanned the old mansion.   
  
"It was obvious from the start..." Steve continued. ".... That something was unusual about Cousin Barnabas. He was almost never seen during the day, and he had an almost uncanny pre-knowledge of the family. No one thought much about it, but then one by one the family vanished. It isn't said who went first, but by the end of summer, not a trace of the family was ever found. Sheriff Patterson back then said it was almost as if they had stepped off the corner of the earth."   
  
Jason narrowed his eyes at Steve's theatrics. He waved his light again inside looking for life within the house while the sky grew even darker than it already was.   
  
"You see that tower," Steve pointed at a tower rising from the corner of the house. "In order to join the Ghost Watchers Society, you need to go inside, find your way to the top and flash your light three times in the window to prove you made it, and then you'll be a member."   
  
"What's the catch?" Jason asked. "I mean, how am I going to find my way up to it?"   
  
"That's the catch." Steve motioned to the largest member of the club. Six feet tall and built like a bear, Derek Thomas started to open the front door but found it locked. A bit miffed, he kicked it hard and motioned to Jason. The would-be pledge made a look back as he flicked on his light to the foyer. He scanned left down a long hall reaching down left of the entrance and then to a staircase almost immediate to his right. His light showing the way, Pryde started hesitantly into the house alone as he tried imagine horrors, both real and imaginary, waiting for him.   
  
"Give me a cigarette." Steve turned to Matt Burton, the fourth member of their little group. "I figure he's got around five minutes to reach the top floor."   
  
"Why's the door locked every time we come up here?" Derek asked. "Are you sure no one is living here?"   
  
"No," Steve chuckled with an evil grin. "Maybe the sheriff locks it, I don't know."   
  
"Hey," Matt whirled around. "I thought I saw someone in that window."   
  
"You're a load of crap."   
  
"No, really!"   
  
"Who was it?"   
  
"I don't know." Matt squinted his eyes as they shared the pack of cigarettes. "It was just a flash.... "   
  
"Yeah, right." Steve wondered. No one really knew if the family was really gone since Collins Enterprises was still making money. For all he knew, they had another house elsewhere and returned on rogue occasions. The disappearance rumor was just that, a rumor. After all, someone was cleaning up their cigarette butts from previous trips.   
  
"I saw a flash." Derek looked up.   
  
"There's two." Matt saw the next one.   
  
"And that's three." Steve turned round. "Guys, we have our new member." They started grinning as they starting thinking of new ways to spend the extra dues. Derek was thinking of more members to invite into the group as Jason then started hollering his head off in Collinwood as if someone were attacking him. Steve, Derek and Matt each cocked their heads up as they heard Jason's frenzied screams echoing from the dark tower room above their heads and far from their realm of senses. They wondered if he was horsing around with them for a change, but it sounded as if he was putting up a fight. His sheer cries were desperate and his torment almost unbearable, but then his long tortured cry began slowly getting killed off as if he were going further and further away. The boys outside watched as his flashlight was flung from the tower and rolled toward them. As they looked up, something white and ethereal started to appear from the dark room behind the window.   
  
"He can go home alone!!" Steve grabbed his bike and tore off through the woods. Matt glanced to Derek a second then joined him.   
  
  
  
PART 2   
  
  
  
"My name is Victoria Winters." the girl on the train wrote in her diary. "One year ago on my birthday I wished that I could find and locate my biological mother, but then last week on my 35th birthday, I got a letter from a woman named Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard. In the letter, she claimed that she was my mother and that she was inviting me to Collinwood, her home near the tiny seaside town of Collinsport, Maine."   
  
Victoria looked out the window a second as she soon continued writing.   
  
"It's been such a long time and I have so many questions." she wrote. "What should I tell her? What should I say? Should I be angry, or should I be happy? I really don't know this woman other than what she claims. I really hope she will like me."   
  
"Tickets." the porter asked her as he hoped she didn't notice him checking her out.   
  
"What?" Victoria looked up with a turn of her long brown hair. Her beauty obviously humbled the porter as she showed her ticket and let him click it. She grinned pleasantly to him. "How much further to Collinsport?" she asked politely.   
  
"Next stop, ma'am." The porter continued on as Victoria beamed excitedly for the moment and then continued on with the writing she had started in her diary. She hoped Mrs. Stoddard would be able to tell her the exact day of her birth. The teachers who had discovered her at the foundling home in which she had been raised had theorized her age and given her the day she was left with them as her birthday. She had been secretly cared for with money that had been anonymously provided, but when she reached adulthood, it all stopped. Someone had stopped the one link to discovering her past. Numerous questions danced through Victoria's mind as she rehearsed them and memorized them for her mother. As she continued writing, a lone dapperly dressed man sitting alone in a back seat of the train car glanced upon her and postured a bit as he looked up. To him, she seemed a bit out of place, but he stayed by his choice to never interfere in the lives of others and merely comment on what he knew was   
to occur unaltered in the future. He turned and looked out the window as he pictured the eyes and minds of many watching these events and waiting for his cosmic narration.   
  
"Submitted for your approval," he started. "Miss Victoria Winters. Five foot seven and a hundred and ten pounds of female innocence displayed in an attractive female image. Unfortunately, this is not the Collinwood you know of. The date is now April 3, 1973; at least eight years later than when a similar Victoria Winters in your world was hired as governess to one David Andrew Collins. In this world, Victoria was no such governess and the Collinwood we are being invited to is not the one we have grown familiar with. One fact has been changed in its past and the consequences are different and disturbing. You see, this Collinwood stands on a rather windswept hill near a dark slope that just happens to descend down into.................... The Twilight Zone."   
  
  
  
PART 3   
  
  
  
Since he had come to Collinsport, Willie Loomis had been in and out of trouble with the law. Since Jason left him behind, he was trying to make his living driving a cab from the train station to the hotel and everywhere else people went to in this spooky little town. His current fare, however, didn't want to go to the hotel; she wanted to be driven out to Collinwood, the creepy old house on the hill overlooking town. Barely seen beyond the trees of the estate, it was altogether obscured at night when the dark sky melded with the tops of the trees. The ride was lonely and the road rarely traveled upon except by the others who lived along this seemingly forgotten back road. Isolated homes with faint signs of their inhabitants popped into view behind every curve and even a stray rabbit appeared in his headlights. Loomis leaned forward as he searched the right hand side of the road for the turn off to the abandoned estate. He suddenly saw the waving dirt road to the side of the road and then the huge stone entrance that led out on to it. The gates were inexplicably hanging open as he heard weeds hitting the underside of the cab. More rabbits scattered from his headlights as he nervously drove slowly up the deserted and unkempt gravel roads.   
  
"Lady," he spoke out loud. "Are you sure you want to come up here? No one's lived here in years."   
  
"This is Collinwood, right?" The voice of Victoria Winters came from the back seat.   
  
"Yes."   
  
"This is where I'm going." Victoria answered assuredly as she stared out nervously to the trees scraping across the cab. Their long branches were like the long wizened fingers of creatures trying to hold them back. The cab turned toward a clearing and began a sharp turn up a steep incline. She looked down and saw the edge of a huge incline rising up over the woods and the wall marking the edge. She felt as if she were the lawyer going to meet Count Dracula as the atmosphere became even more foreboding to her. On the other side, Collinwood reared up like a mighty presence. Huge and gothic as some deserted castle, it was bathed in complete black against the darkness of the cloudy night sky. The cab stopped within walking distance of the front veranda. She looked at the fare and pulled out a five-dollar bill to cover it and the tip.   
  
"Are you sure someone's expecting you?" Loomis asked.   
  
"Yes," Victoria insisted.   
  
"Look, lady," Willie turned to her. "Back in 1967, a buddy and I came to Collinsport. He had claimed to be an old friend of the family here. He left me at the hotel, and came up here alone. I never saw him again."   
  
"I don't believe in ghosts." Victoria grinned demurely.   
  
"Suit yourself," Willie took the five and pressed down the flag on his dashboard. "You want me to wait for you?" He stared out the passenger window toward her leaning in to him.   
  
"I'll use the phone if I need you." Victoria carried her suitcase as he pulled off and left her. If it had not been for the bicycle out front and cigarette butts, she might have thought the house was deserted. She gazed up the front of it, walked under the front portico and rapped at the door as it jarred open. She peeked in and saw a fire burning in a distant room as she calmly strolled inside and forced her eyes to pry the darkness. The whole place was completely dark except for the burning fire in the next room, but someone must have lit it.   
  
"Hello?" She called inside. "Is anyone home??"   
  
"Yes," A person popped up behind the door. Dressed in a black sweater and a dark green floor level skirt, her white face and long blonde hair appeared as if it were floating in the dark as some disembodied head. Forlornly unassuming, she was obviously very attractive, but apparently a bit careful about anyone she allowed to come traipsing in here unannounced. A slight hesitant scan over her guest, she gazed back to Victoria curiously and coldly.   
  
"Hello," Victoria beamed a brief second. "I'm Victoria Winters. I'm looking for Elizabeth Collins-Stoddard."   
  
Her benefactor stood quietly studying her as if she did not trust her.   
  
"I have a letter." Victoria pulled out the envelope and handed it over to her. The short but somber presence took out the letter and began reading it as she wandered into the drawing room. The whole room was lit only by the fire in the fireplace as she regally and arrogantly gestured to Victoria to follow her. Carrying her cases further, the young ingénue was again gestured to sit as she looked around the dark room. Her blonde hostess sat down in a regal almost intimidating manner into a huge chair before the fire as if it were a throne.   
  
"Oh my god," her blonde benefactor finally spoke. "I can't believe it. I have a sister."   
  
"Sister?"   
  
"Vicki, can I call you Vicki?" The blonde hostess of the house stroked her long waist length hair over her shoulder. "Our mother passed away sometime back..."   
  
"How's that possible?" Vicki Winters asked. "I just got this letter last week."   
  
"The family lawyer must have sent it on a pre-assigned date." The lovely but intimidating presence identified herself. "I'm Carolyn Stoddard, your half-sister. My god, I have a sister!" She still couldn't believe it.   
  
"So do I." Vicki forced a smile as her heart sank. "Is there anyone else? Are you alone here?"   
  
"I'm afraid so." Carolyn leaned over to a tray on the table with a teapot and platter of cookies. "Mother died sometime back in her sleep. Our Uncle Roger had a car accident sometime after Cousin Barnabas arrived and Cousin David, Uncle Roger's son, he left to live with his mother. He hasn't been to visit in over a year. And then once in a while, someone from the business comes and checks up on me, but that's only once or twice a month."   
  
"And you stay here all by yourself?" Vicki was invited to share the cookies. "Where's this Cousin Barnabas?" She looked up with interest as she lightly nibbled into one.   
  
"He returned to England." Carolyn spoke after a delayed silence. "I'm so sorry. This is not much a homecoming for you."   
  
"No," Vicki sipped the tea Carolyn poured for her. "On the contrary, I finally know who I am. I found my family. That's all I really wanted."   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn leaned over and looked into her face. "I hope we can be very good friends." As she grinned mysteriously in the flickering shadows cast by the fireplace, she appeared a lot more sinister than she did in the foyer!   
  
  
  
PART 4   
  
  
  
Vicki emptied her suitcase into the closet as she scanned the room from the huge poster bed to the view of the old house in the tree line of the woods outside the window. She passed her hand over the faint layer of dust on the bureau as she heard her door jarred open. Carolyn brushed against it carrying a huge single tray with a covered plate as she entered and placed the tray down on the desk.   
  
"I knew you'd be hungry." The lovely blonde turned round with a secretive grin. "I reheated some of the roast. Hope you like eggplant!"   
  
"I don't mind." Vicki felt accepted as she clicked on the extra lamp. Carolyn reacted slightly to the extra light in the room as her eyes adjusted. "Have you eaten already?" She asked her newfound sister.   
  
"Hours ago," Carolyn beamed as she gazed upon her new relative and saw a lot of their mother in her. "I hope you like this room. It was mother's. There are fresh linens in the closet if you want them, help yourself to anything in the kitchen and if you wake up in the morning and I'm not around, don't panic. I'm a bit of a night owl. I usually don't go to bed till four in the morning and I often sleep till six in the afternoon."   
  
"I'll keep it quiet." Vicki spoke softly as she sat before her plate and grinned. "Why I just bet you want to return to your coffin in the basement." She chuckled a bit.   
  
"Something like that." Carolyn chuckled too with a toss of her long golden locks. "Oh, if you want to go to town, the keys to the town car are on a hook in the kitchen. Have a good night."   
  
"Good night." Vicki sipped her drink. She reacted as she found it to be red wine; she'd never had it before. She ate her dinner quietly and was soon showered and changed for bed. The sheets were cold, yet fresh, as she marveled at how Carolyn handled the house by herself. She remembered her saying something about a servant who came round every so many days as she read the book by the bed. Her watch read it was well after midnight as the found daughter switched off the lamp and lapsed into unconsciousness.   
  
She wasn't sure if she was asleep yet when she heard the noise. She may have been just drifting off, but she soon found herself cocking her head to a noise. It was sort of a... creaking noise, no, a crying sound. She was sure it was someone crying as she pulled back her covers and pulled on her wrap. She wasn't sure which room was Carolyn's but someone was crying. Her gaze fell on the door at the end of the hall as she wondered if it was a bedroom, but as she reached to open it, she found it was locked to her as she turned to look down the other way. Someone in the house was crying long mournful sobs as if they had lost their most beloved. It didn't sound like Carolyn's voice. It sounded like it might be an older woman in the house. Gliding through the house as if she were her own phantom, Vicki wondered if there could be another person here in the house as she rapped at one bedroom door and stuck her head inside it.   
  
"Carolyn?" It was a boy's room. One single bed sat against the wall waiting for its master as books and models gathered dust. A deserted pair of clothes sat folded neatly on the corner of the bed in silent witness of the empty room. In the corner, a baseball bat laid upright with no one to hit balls with it. Vicki glanced around harmlessly as she stepped back and closed the door to the room as she listened again. The crying was a bit further as she headed to the door to the foyer. She placed one foot out on the balcony eerily lit by the stain-glass window to her left and looked down as she saw a woman exit from the doorway under the balcony, hurriedly cross the landing in the dim colored light and enter the darkened drawing room. A bit older than Carolyn and with short dark hair, she held something like a handkerchief to her face as she passed beyond Victoria's vision and glided effortlessly out of sight.   
  
"Hello?" Vicki moved lightly down the stairs to the bottom floor as the doors of the drawing room closed to her. Barely sealed to her, she pushed them wide and looked inside. The room was empty but for the continuing blaze in the fireplace and the crying was gone. She wondered if the person had left through the back hall in the corner across from the fireplace to the dining room. Passing the piano in the room and locked doors to a garden behind the mansion, Vicki found herself in the dark recesses of dining room. The room seemed deserted as the huge oak table sat waiting for grand meals to be served upon it. There were enough chairs for sixteen people here as she touched the dead flowers and dried leaves in the centerpiece. Scanning the emptiness meeting her, she peeked to the kitchen a second then headed through the dining room back to the foyer. It appeared abandoned as chairs sat up on top of the breakfast table undisturbed. She could not believe that Carolyn lived here all alone in this huge house when she could invite several friends to live here rent-free and keep her company. Could the old woman be one of them and if she were, why did she not at least mention her?   
  
"Where could she have gone?" Her voice asked the darkness.   
  
  
  
PART 5   
  
  
  
  
  
Victoria saw no sign of Carolyn as she woke the next morning and found a note in the kitchen for her. Apparently, there was a breakfast plate warming for her in the oven. Loving the idea of having a sister, she ate the big breakfast alone in the dining room as she looked up to paintings of forgotten relatives. She left the dishes in the dishwasher as dutifully as possible as she then noticed there were no plates left behind from when Carolyn ate. For that matter, where were the frying pans for the omelets and pancakes or even the bowl as she whipped them up? What about even a spatula? There was not even a second plate or glass. She wondered if she had just reused her old plate as she pulled open one drawer and noticed everything neatly and cleanly tucked away in the drawer. In a grand wooden cabinet with glass windows, all the prominent Collins china also sat reasonably untouched except for fine traces of dust. Things were not making much more sense to her the more she analyzed them and thought about them.   
  
Trying to attribute the strange habits as a person who had lived alone for too long, Victoria spent part of the morning outside exploring the grounds and reflecting on the sounds of the estate rather than the idiosyncrasies of a younger sister she barely knew. Keeping the main house in view, she often found herself looking up at the grand estate with its numerous windows and balconies and parapets and chimneys. There was so much inside she wanted to explore as she tried to think of ancestors and relatives who had once roamed its walls. Thinking about them, she hurriedly returned inside back through the kitchen mud porch and found the study where books upon books of the Collins family history rested partially touched on a prominent shelf near another fireplace. Her whole family history was laid out before her and all she had to do was look as she pulled one book and then another. Her mind was reeling excitedly as she absorbed facts of colorful family members going back to England and   
back to the dusk of the Middle Ages. The whole American family turned out to be descended from Isaac Collins, the town founder, a relative connected by marriage to the British aristocracy. Her roots and origins filling her head, she beamed in private as she read of forgotten grandfathers and uncles. It seemed like just a little while, but almost immediately she realized the room was getting dark. Dusk was occurring outside as she heard Carolyn moving through the house.   
  
"Vicki?"   
  
"In here." Vicki responded as Carolyn turned back down the foyer to the source of the voice.   
  
"Ah, the study," Carolyn grinned in retrospect. "After all this time I can still hear my Uncle Roger telling me to stop disturbing his important papers." She chuckled under her breath.   
  
"He must have been very no nonsense." Vicki guessed as she held up a book. "Carolyn, who's this?" She held up an album with a picture of a very beautiful woman in her late thirties.   
  
"That's our mother." Carolyn responded proudly but a bit heartbroken. "She was beautiful, wasn't she?"   
  
"She was." Vicki agreed. "I saw her ghost last night."   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn became upset. "That's not funny."   
  
"I'm serious. I saw her."   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn glared oddly at her. "If my mother was here, don't you think I'd know it ? Wouldn't she appear to her own daughter?!"   
  
"I guess....."   
  
"I loved my mother very much." Carolyn continued. "And she loved me. If she was here, I'd know it. I mean, why would she appear to you and not to me?"   
  
Vicki didn't have an answer as Carolyn scoffed and turned out. She stayed where she was for a few minutes as she continued looking through the albums. All the pictures stopped in the winter of 1967. Numerous pre-dated pages were blank as Carolyn had stopped taking pictures of herself. There was no trace of David even allegedly taken by his mother or even of his mother herself.   
  
Vicki felt a bit unnerved as Carolyn called her to dinner. She rose and looked out to the dining room at the single serving.   
  
"You're not eating?" She noticed no other plates.   
  
"I got a date." Carolyn responded. "Have a nice night...." The vivacious blonde passed by her and rushed to the foyer around her. Vicki started to say something as the fleet-footed blonde vanished on her. She just sat down and stared at her baked fish, cucumber salad and okra. Under the tin, there was a piece of blueberry cheesecake just waiting to join her hips. She was certainly being fattened up.   
  
"Oh, Carolyn...." She had forgotten to ask her about a trip to town. Not hearing the front door, she rushed to catch her, but just seemed to miss her. She opened the double doors expecting to see a car, but there wasn't one. There were no taillights in the distance either. Vicki heard footsteps upstairs as she figured Carolyn was still getting ready. She jogged upstairs and crossed the balcony to open the door as a strange man passed her. She froze in surprise as he drifted by.   
  
"Hello?" She tried to get his attention. Tall, distinguished and rather somber, he was dressed in a thick cape of some sort as if he had just come in from outside. His wolf-handled cane touched the floor every so often as he leaned into it on every other step. He looked so solemnly serious he seemed to be unaware of her presence.   
  
"Excuse me," Vicki followed him. "Can you hear me?" She tried to remember her sign language as he seemed to just barely acknowledge her presence. At the door to the end of the hall, he turned and looked to Vicki as he gestured to her to come. His expression became a tortured grin looking for solace as he gradually drifted away into nothingness.   
  
Vicki's scream began echoing the myriad halls of Collinwood.   
  
  
  
PART 6   
  
  
  
Vicki looked up from her bed as Carolyn sat by her. Her eyes darted around the room as she fretfully held her fingers distraughtly to her chin. The wet cloth to her head fell to her lap as Carolyn held it back up.   
  
"Vicki, what happened?" Carolyn sounded concerned. "I just got home and found you in the hall. What happened?"   
  
"I think I saw another ghost." Vicki knew how ridiculous she sounded. "It looked like the man in the portrait in the foyer, but... he was different somehow. More modern, perhaps."   
  
"That's the first Barnabas Collins who went to England." Carolyn looked back at her disbelievingly. "I think you mean Cousin Barnabas, his descendant, but Vicki, he's still alive. He returned to England. If anything, you maybe saw his ancestor. They looked so much alike."   
  
"Carolyn..." Victoria rose off her bed as she thought of the next thing to say, but then another thought pervaded her mind. "How'd I get in here?"   
  
"I brought you in." Carolyn sat on the bed as she looked back at her. Her eyes met Vicki's as the young ingénue glanced back to her. "Do you want me to bring you something up to eat?"   
  
"No, I..........." Vicki rolled her eyes around the room as her world was being turned upside down around her. "You've never seen ghosts here?"   
  
"None." Carolyn's response was short and brief and trapped in a whisper. The petite blonde stood up straight with a toss of her long blonde hair as her hand glided over her black sweater.   
  
"Then why am I seeing them?"   
  
"The prodigal daughter is home." Carolyn slightly leaned in with a grin. "They're excited to have you home." Carolyn stood up straight. "I better get your dinner reheated."   
  
"Carolyn?"   
  
"Yes?"   
  
"Will you be eating with me?" Vicki watched as Carolyn opened her mouth to say something, but then stood there with her lips partially apart.   
  
"If that's what you want…" The heiress answered back; her voice trailing off a bit disconcertingly.   
  
Vicki watched as her secretive sister glided out on the proverbial wings of her feet. She sat on her bed a second and folded her arms as her mind ran over so many of the vague puzzle pieces around her that didn't fit together. A half-sister who preferred the night who didn't eat. Spirits that roamed the house but never crossed her path. A seemingly deserted house where she was pretty much cut off from town. The friend of the cab driver who came up here and vanished. A date she had never seen. She suddenly remembered something else. Barnabas's ghost wasn't exactly trying to scare her. He was trying to show her something in the west wing. Was there something in there she had to see?   
  
"Maybe that's where she keeps her coffin..." Vicki mumbled to herself partially in jest as she realized it made a bit of sense. She had seen a few vampire films in her time. The idea of living vampires sounded ridiculous, but then so was the idea of a person being alone so far from town in this foreboding edifice.   
  
Vicki slid off her bed and opened the jewelry box she had brought from the foundling home. Her favorite nurse, Ida McDonald, had given her a necklace she wore only on special occasions. It was a small silver cross on a silver chain. She linked it around her neck as she looked into the mirror. She wondered if Carolyn had a reflection.   
  
Stepping from her room, she glanced at the west wing door a second then looked back down the hall. She silently jaunted up to it unseen as she tested the doorknob and nervously turned it. It was locked.   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn puttered around the kitchen as a would-be culinary maestro as she saw Vicki come down the back stairs. "Do you like eggplant?"   
  
"That's fine." Vicki noticed the solitary plate being prepared out of habit. She realized she was being fattened up for the kill. Exuberant and carefree, Carolyn had to be the most lively undead that she had ever seen. She watched as the lethal blonde opened the oven as the scent of baking chicken pervaded the kitchen.   
  
"Do you prefer something other than wine?" Carolyn passed before her again. "I don't drink it myself, but I never thought to ask you if you preferred something else." She paused and stared at Vicki's necklace.   
  
"That's lovely." Her small hand even held it up off of the front of Vicki's blouse. "Can I try it on?"   
  
"What? You mean it..."   
  
"This is so beautiful." Carolyn took the necklace and draped it around her neck as she left the kitchen. Standing before a mirror in the dimly lit dining room, she watched the candlelight flickering off the cross in the mirror as Carolyn pulled some super-model gestures. She lifted up her waist-length blonde hair and flirted with her reflection as Vicki appeared behind her.   
  
"Joe Haskell, you are mine tonight." Carolyn growled at her image. "Vicki, can I borrow this tonight? Please, I won't let anything happen to it."   
  
"What?" Vicki quickly pulled herself together. "Oh, um, sure." She watched Carolyn grin back to her as she planned for the heiress's departure. The second she was gone, she was going to break into the west wing!   
  
  
  
PART 7   
  
  
  
Vicki felt inexplicably nervous as she watched Carolyn leave the dining room. She glanced at her plate and realized she had eaten very little, if anything at all. She had taken a small bite of the chicken, the smallest piece of eggplant but had barely touched her peas. She looked at her necklace bobbing on Carolyn's chest and wondered if the vampire legends were wrong, or if she were something else.   
  
"Joe's getting me in a second." Carolyn threw down her napkin. "Just put the plates in the dishwasher and nuke them. Don't wait up." The mysterious blonde grinned enigmatically and raced to the foyer from the end of the dining room. Vicki rose with her as she vanished and cut through the back hall into the drawing room. She glided as silently as possible to the doors and peeked through the crack as her half-sister vanished into the night. With her gone, the wayward daughter secreted herself back upstairs and rushed to the end of the hall. Her eyes fell on the door to the west wing as she noticed the key in the lock of the door. Where'd that come from? Had Carolyn been in and out since dinner, or were the ghosts trying to help her?   
  
Vicki turned the lock over as her heart began pumping faster. She pushed against the door as an inexplicable wave of apprehension and dread came over her. Fighting the illogical panic attack she was feeling, she left the door ajar and passed through two arches supporting a short hall and then into a long corridor lined with doors. All her memories of reading Nancy Drew novels were returning her as she stopped quietly and looked around the empty corridor. The area was dark and meticulous as some museum after hours. The air even smelled sweet like cinnamon or some other rich spice. Between bedroom doors were paintings above ornate cabinets. She glanced nervously at the painting of a beautiful blonde and regal grand dame. The nameplate read "Angelique Bouchard-Collins" and her rich azure eyes seemed to be following her. Vicki turned to a chair nearby. Next to it, a book had been left upside down as if someone had just left it. Covered in a plain black cover, its inner title page read   
"The Iliad."   
  
Out the corner of her eye, Vicki thought she saw a glimpse of someone hurrying to get out of her way. She turned back to Angelique's portrait and forced herself to look closer to the visage of the beautiful woman upon it. It was still watching her as she felt a shudder down her spine. A faint noise of weeping was guiding Vicki as she entered an open bedroom. She had the feeling someone was crying as she advanced on a chair to see the person in it. Vicki tried to say something as Liz Stoddard finally stood up to her.   
  
"Why'd you do it, Carolyn?" She asked distraughtly. "Why did you do it?"   
  
"Do what?" Vicki asked. "What'd she do?"   
  
"Carolyn," Liz's spirit seemed to reliving the last seconds of her life. "Why would you kill your mother?"   
  
Vicki gasped and turned around as hands grabbed her and spun her around. Roger Collins gripped her tightly as he too became trapped in time.   
  
"I treated you like a daughter." He said to her. "How could you do what you did?"   
  
"I'm not Carolyn!" Vicki forced her arms loose and turned as Barnabas stood leaning on his cane.   
  
"Carolyn," He looked distraughtly to her. "I'm so sorry. I never meant what happened to occur."   
  
"What happened?!!" Vicki implored the shades starting to surround her. She stepped back into a chair, landing in it and tipping it as it fell over with her in it. Flipped over completely, Vicki held her head as David Collins stood looking at her.   
  
"I didn't mean to see! I didn't mean to see!!" He started screaming as Vicki looked back. Roger and Liz were reaching down to her as Barnabas watched. Vicki suddenly saw other faces she didn't recognize. A handsome figure with sideburns covered in dust, a beautiful blonde woman with white skin morosely watching, a little girl watching from a chair, a sinister reverend with tortured eyes, another man covered in dust with a look of sheer hatred and a brunette ingénue hiding in a doorway. Several of them advanced on her as they reached down to her. Vicki backed to the wall and shrieked as she recoiled from their undead touches. She froze where she was as she slowly opened her eyes. They were all gone. She wasn't sure if they had been real or if she had imagined it, as she looked around once more. The once beautiful room was now ruined and deserted. Portraits were faded and furniture was covered in dust as debris and disassembled furniture lined walls. Her eyes gasped as she noticed   
Angelique was the only one not quite so ruined by neglect. It seemed much more vibrant than the rest as Vicki's voice gasped. She braced herself to stand up then paused as she noticed the feet of someone standing before her. She looked up and up as Carolyn towered over her on the floor. She had the same despondent look she had as when Vicki had arrived.   
  
"You know, don't you?"   
  
"You killed them." Vicki slowly stood on her feet. "You killed them all!"   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn advanced on Vicki as her perfect hair lightly swayed elegantly on her shoulders. "You don't know what you're talking about. Let's go downstairs and talk about it."   
  
"No!" Vicki backed from her. "I don't know what you are, but you're not human!!"   
  
"Vicki, you're talking crazy." Speaking slowly and assuredly, Carolyn followed her down the hall. "Take my hand and we'll talk about it."   
  
"Don't touch me!!" Vicki shifted Angelique's portrait as her back hit the wall. "You're a monster!! You're not real!!!!"   
  
"Vicki, you're losing it." Carolyn didn't look away from Vicki as she instinctively straightened Angelique's picture with one gesture. Her eyes were methodical and cold as if it was just something she had to do. "Just touch me and I can make you feel all better."   
  
"No!!" Vicki backed away further as she bumped into some doors. "You want to kill me, just as she you did them!!!!" Her eyes looked into the second floor library as she started screaming. There were bodies everywhere sitting at tables with books or standing before shelves. Each one was dried and desiccated without anything human left to suggest they were once alive. Skeletons with hair stared back at her with empty eye sockets and hideous grins permanently etched on their frozen decayed faces. Posed and displayed in deteriorating clothes, they sat in chairs with books in their hands or stood balanced against shelves as if they had just been caught reading. There had to be over a dozen of them. The whole room looked to be some sort of shrine dedicated to the dead. Her voice filled the room with the shocking piercing strain of a woman losing her mind!   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn spoke. "Stop screaming. This is our family and friends." She turned to a body wearing a decaying dress. "Mother, this is Vicki. I told you about her." She paused. "Mother says you're more beautiful than she thought."   
  
Vicki froze in terror against a shelf as she watched Carolyn moving through the room talking to the corpses. Her demented half-sister paused by one and even kissed it.   
  
"Joe, we need to find a date for Vicki." Carolyn turned toward two skeletons literally propping each other up. "Tom or Chris? I don't think they're her type, but I can ask." She looked back into the alcove. "Mother, tell Jason he is too old." She then turned her head to the remains of a young man playing checkers with the emaciated rotting remains of another young man. "Vicki, I think this young man has a crush on you. No, not David, the one I caught in the tower last week."   
  
"You're mad." Vicki forced out. "You're not normal!" She started to run out past Carolyn, but the demented blonde stopped her with an eager grimace and closed the doors. She took the key from the double doors as she locked them and then grinned almost demonically back to Vicki.   
  
"Mad??" Carolyn dropped the key down the top of her black sweater. "Well, we all go a little mad sometimes. Let me help you feel better!!" She lunged as Vicki shrieked. She grabbed a book and threw it at Carolyn, but the blonde psycho ducked too fast. Disgusted as she was by the corpses around her, she started darting around the table between her and Carolyn as her sister shoved the heavy oak table with minimal effort and sent it with a crash into the wall. Vicki's eyes widened at the remarkable feat of strength as she whirled around to keep her eyes on her. Could anything stop her?! Was there anything that could? Falling over bones in a chair, Vicki crashed to the floor atop a tangle of broken bones and dried cadaverous human remains trapped in a tangle of clothing as Carolyn grabbed her leg. She felt an immediate burning sensation from her as she felt herself getting older and her body drying from the inside out. Her soul felt it was almost entering Carolyn as her demented half-sister tilted her head back in and gasped at the sensation of her sister's life force filling her every being. Maybe this would be the one to do it. Maybe finally she could end this curse on her. Vicki briefly felt she was inside Carolyn watching her do this to herself. The blonde one started to lightly grin in demented pleasure as Vicki's eyes slowly glanced at the wolf's head cane in the hand of the body she had shattered underneath her. Her fingers weakly gripped it as she reared back hard. Hitting her sister as firmly as she could with it, the burning stopped, but she felt like an old woman as Carolyn gasped full of strength and vitality. The blonde psycho grinned ear to ear as Vicki hobbled on her burning leg and swung the old cane.   
  
"Why did you do that, Vicki?" Carolyn grinned devilishly once more. "I could make you so beautiful. All I need is your soul, your life force, you won't miss it. Do you hear them complaining?"   
  
"I...." Vicki backed away wearily swinging the cane. "Don't know..... What you are, but.........." She felt as if she was having a heart attack as she backed against the window. "You're not getting........... My life."   
  
"Vicki," Carolyn reached for her face. "You'll be so much more happier a part of me."   
  
The lovely brunette ingénue continued squeezing herself into the garret window. She would rather jump out of it to save herself than give up her life. She continued squeezing backward and backward as Carolyn's hands reached for her. Her hands were almost to her face as Vicki wept in fear and realized that this was how she was going to go. She gasped one last weakened breath as her eyes rounded in fear of what was happening to her. Cowering in fear against the window, she then felt the windowpane snap open behind her and give way as she felt air and then hitting the ground down below hard without realizing what had happened. She heard a sick crunch under her back as her head reared back. Her last visage was of Carolyn looking down from the third floor window.   
  
"Don't worry Vicki!" Carolyn looked down from the window to her sister lying lifeless. "I'll help you!!" She vanished beaming ear to ear from the window.   
  
Vicki gasped as she felt her strength returning. Her heartbeat just barely returned to normal as she felt the soft earth and squashed weeds under her back. Feeling sore and bruised all over, she forced herself to roll over as she crawled across the ground under her and dropped again two feet off the edge of the veranda stretching the length of the estate. Pulling herself up wearily, she limped as far as she could on one leg and then slipped and rolled on her back into the trees. She rubbed the hand-shaped burn on her leg as she stared back to Collinwood and marveled at how far she had been able to come. She had reached the trees as she heard a crash from the estate. Carolyn came storming out the kitchen entrance in a hurry as she stopped under the window and looked around. She looked slightly comical as her long strands of hair flitted about her turning head. Trying to see where Vicki was, she rubbed her head.   
  
"Vicki," She called out. "But I'm your sister!!!!!!!"   
  
  
  
PART 8   
  
  
  
Tony Peterson was starving for a cigarette as he and Richard Garner paced in the hospital waiting room. They had the papers for Victoria to sign and take legal ownership of Collinwood as the hospital staff refused them to enter. Sheriff George Patterson left her room still a bit unnerved by what his men had found in the upstairs west wing library. There were over twenty-six bodies in the room in identical stages of advanced decomposition including young Jason Pryde and he'd only been missing a week. The bodies of the whole Collins family had finally been found along with Joe Haskell, Jason McGuire, Tom and Chris Jennings and several missing teenagers and transients from the last ten years or so. Coroner Cyrus Longworth was going to have a field day trying to figure this out.   
  
"Elliot," Dr. Julia Hoffman stuck her head out of the room. "You can see her now."   
  
The tall intimidating professor stood up as he placed his magazine aside and strode across the hall. Since the mystery began, he had been living in the Old House where his ancestor once worked. He had explored Collinwood several times, but he could not explain why he had never seen that room before. Had Carolyn been able to hide herself and it from him for all these years? If Victoria hadn't stumbled out of the woods near the Old House, he'd have never found it.   
  
"Miss Winters," He sat down in a chair by the side of her bed and removed his monocle as Vicki looked up weary from her experience. "I'm Professor Timothy Elliot Stokes; I'm the man who found you."   
  
"Did you find them?" Vicki asked as Dr. Hoffman stood nearby.   
  
"We did." Stokes answered. "Police are still combing the house and grounds."   
  
"I can't believe it." Vicki tried to lose the horrible images trapped in her mind. "I don't know how it all could have happened."   
  
"To understand what happened," Stokes's graveled voice began. "I think we have to go back almost ten years to when Matthew Morgan worked as manservant and caretaker to Liz Stoddard. He was extremely protective of Liz and her daughter and wanted to protect them both. After confessing to the murder of Bill Malloy to Liz, Morgan hid out at Eagle Hill Cemetery where he must have accidentally released something he couldn't understand. A great evil you might be compelled to call a vampire. The police found Morgan that night drained of blood below Widow's Hill, but he was not the only one to fall that way. Seven women died that way...."   
  
"One of them was a waitress named Maggie Evans." Dr. Julia Hoffman added. "I had been called in to treat her for her injuries, but she didn't survive. Whatever was killing the women took her too."   
  
"I suspected Barnabas Collins." Stokes continued. "But couldn't prove it, but then after Maggie, the deaths changed. Whatever was killing the women of town changed and went deeper, sucking the life forces of both men and women. Eighteen hours after he vanished, Burke Devlin was found in his hotel as a dried out desiccated husk identified only by his dental records. The Jennings Brothers soon vanished and soon after young man named Jeff Clark. Two years after Morgan killed Malloy, all of the Collins family also inexplicably vanished."   
  
"It was Carolyn." Vicki answered wearily as Stokes looked oddly at Julia. "She killed everyone."   
  
"Carolyn?" Julia looked spooked.   
  
"She tried to absorb my soul." Vicki answered trying to keep from falling asleep. "I don't know what she was, but for a brief second, I felt I was her." She took a minute to shudder from the facts and events from the last few days as she refused to believe they had actually happened as they did.  
  
"The term is succubus." Elliot remarked. "A female creature who feeds on life forces to live forever and for various powers, but you needn't know that, you rest." He glanced awkwardly to Julia as they left Ms. Winters to receive her rest and gather her full strength… She turned out the light as she left the room and briefly shooed away Garner and Peterson. Rejoining Stokes, the two of them continued down the hall.   
  
"Carolyn?" Julia sounded skeptical her voice followed her down the hall. "But she vanished in the séance!!"   
  
"She must have brought something back." Stokes answered as they crossed behind a familiar man at the coffee machine. Things had unfolded just as he knew they would be as he glanced at Stokes and Dr. Hoffman continuing away from him down the hall. He turned and removed his cigarette from his lips to talk and add his final thoughts on this alternate reality for mainstream viewers who did not belong to this timeline.   
  
"Despite her experience," The strange man added a postscript. "Victoria Winters did inherit Collinwood and eventually transformed it into a school. She never forgot her ordeal either as she was forever reminded of it by the hand-shaped burn on her leg. No mention of the bodies was ever made either as Carolyn Stoddard seemed to vanish completely this time, but not entirely. A few weeks later, state police found a desiccated corpse drained of life on the road to Bangor. So, if you're ever traveling through Maine and you see a rather lovely blonde girl wandering down the road, I wouldn't stop to offer her a ride; you might not live to regret it. You can find this one labeled under "shadows" in one of the myriad files of The Twilight Zone."   
  
  
  
END   
  



End file.
